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After four weeks of pouting, shouting, rolling my eyes, kicking the ground, folding my arms and refusing to have my photograph taken, I was ready to come home from my glorious mother-daughter bonding vacation in China.

There's a reason we grow up and move out of our parents' homes -- and it might be closely related to the reason grown-up children shouldn't spend 24 hours a day with their mothers. "Are you ready for the Great Wall of Mom?" asked my brother's boyfriend a week before I left. I really didn't know what I was in for.

After years of barely surviving 20-minute, semi-weekly phone conversations, I became convinced that the key to improving our relationship was to spend a month navigating China together, from Hong Kong to Beijing. This was going to be the trip where we broke through all of our trivial differences and perceived slights, finally learning how to appreciate each other as individuals. I was clearly labouring under the delusion that if you put two warring bees in a jar, they would immediately resolve their issues and go get some iced lattes.

Instead, we made each other miserable as we suffocated under the weight of too much time together. True, the country was magically dense with historical sites, stunning landscapes and unrecognizable but delicious foods. But a haze of discord pervaded as we struggled to rise above petty dramas. The Terracotta Warriors left us breathless on a beautiful, sunny day -- but they were still clouded over by an ugly disagreement over my refusal to purchase a cute skirt.

Kathryn Borel Jr. had similarly lofty ambitions when her 26-year-old self planned a three-week wine trip through France with her sometimes-inaccessible father in 2005. They drove several hours a day in a small diesel car through Alsace, Burgundy, Cotes du Rhone and Languedoc. "The idea behind the trip was to bond over wine -- a thing that he loves," says Borel, whose memoir about the experience, Corked, is being published in January by John Wiley & Sons.

Of course, things rarely go that smoothly. Borel soon found herself displaying "arch-brat behaviour." She had saddled the trip with so much significance that any defections from a perfect father-daughter exchange became crushing. "[I was] scared that I was missing this huge opportunity to get to know him," she says. "At the end, we'd both relaxed and everything became interesting and fun and significant. But this didn't happen without me wanting to drive the car into a tree at one point to commit murder-suicide."

Sara Dimerman, an author and therapist in private practice in Thornhill, says that it's normal to bring a little extra baggage on an adult family vacation in the form of regression, exhaustion from requisite quantity time and the reemergence of seemingly timeless issues. "Rather than travelling as equal companions, parents and children can fall back into old patterns and habits," says Dimerman. "They may be reminded of what really irritated them about each other."

Family members often bring out the worst in us, sometimes resulting in behaviour that would appall us if we directed it at a non-relation. (Thanks a lot, unconditional love, for making me act like a jerk.) "When you're with someone you're not as familiar with, you're more at an arm's length and you're not going to be as easily triggered by idiosyncratic behaviour," says Dimerman. In other words, when a friend leaves you waiting in a restaurant for 15 minutes, you aren't reminded of that time she forgot to pick you up at soccer practice.

So are family vacations a good idea if your relationship is already strained? "It's a nice idea, but maybe you need to take a therapist with you," says Dimerman. Of course, just because my mother and I often didn't get along, or because the silences sometimes made me feel even more estranged, doesn't mean that the trip sandbagged our relationship. The mother-daughter bond is, of course, more complicated than that.

My mom left China a few days before me, and things had been tense leading up to her departure. I was looking forward to feeling more like myself and less like a surly 15-year-old. But as I watched her awkwardly navigate her overstuffed backpack, I was suddenly struck with the urge to ask her to stay. I was sure we could do better; I would try harder and be nicer and less judgmental. And maybe in return, she could stop referring to me as "full-figured."

"I think our next trip should be on motorbike across a warmer country," she said unexpectedly. "Maybe we could have a travel show and we could stop and cook something every now and then."

I was incredulous. "A cross-country cooking travel show on motorbike?" I asked, helping her into a cab bound for the airport. "What could possibly go wrong?"

"Exactly," she said, failing to detect my sarcasm. "You know, you've got to be a little crazy to enjoy yourself."

She hugged me tightly and got into the cab. And for the first time in a month, I started to miss my mom.

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